Elsewhere

Numbers are used as justification when there is no personal relationship.

Think about that for a moment.

If I trust that you’re going to give me correct change, I don’t even count it when you give it to me. Why bother? I trust you. And I trust you because I know you–we have a relationship. I trust that, even if you miscounted and I find out later, you would quickly correct the mistake, with little harm done.

When some stranger gives me change, I count it. We have no relationship; both his competency and his ethics are suspect. Guilty until proven innocent, you might say, but really, most of us have been burned enough times to accept this reality of everyday life. There’s a fine line between openness and naivete.

This concept scales indefinitely. We monitor the finances of corporations because we don’t trust them. We quantify our achievements so that we can prove to some stranger in the human resources department why we deserve a raise. We don’t need to prove that to our boss; she already knows us. But she needs to prove it to them.

With each degree of separation, trust drops dramatically. I trust you, and I might trust your friend, but I might double check them anyway; and their friend, I wouldn’t trust much more than a complete stranger.

Think about how much time and energy is spent on numbers–justifying, proving, defending to people we don’t know. Entire industries, professions, and disciplines within professions are dedicated to it. How much efficiency could be gained if there was a trusted personal relationship instead?

I don’t have any answers or moral message here. I know that life usually gets more complicated than that. Just something to think about.

Dear God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

I first remember learning this insightful, elegant prayer at a young age from a wooden inscription hung above the door of a neighbor’s kitchen. It’s been stuck in my head ever since.

Something quite interesting and significant about the second of the prayer’s three parts is the implication that we should change things when we can.

It makes me think of some of my new friends in Austin, including Steve Harper, Asha, and MagnumVox–a self-described “change agent.” That’s a good term. We should all consider whether or not we are acting as change agents, both personally and professionally. (OMG, sorry, but perfect moment to plug Steve’s The Ripple Effect again.)

When I was a boy scout, whenever we’d go camping in the wilderness, our motto was, “Leave it better than you found it.” Pack out any trash you find (even if it’s not your own), don’t trample or otherwise vandalize the area.

Once, in my early teens, someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grow up. My response was something like, “I hope I never grow up. I hope I never stop growing.”

***

Growth and change are an integral part of life. Life is growth. Without growth, and change, we’d still be a bunch of random chemicals floating around on a primordial planet.

Many people make the mistake of thinking that there is some end-state, some point in time at which everything levels off and they can just comfortably cruise through the rest of life.

Any such security is an illusion, and temporary at best. Just ask anybody who’s lived through the uncertainties and surprises of the past century. The only constant is change.

Would you prefer to be reactive or proactive in dealing with the inevitable changes of life? Which one do you think might bring you more success and happiness?

If you choose to be proactive, you are choosing the path of creativity, in which you attempt to anticipate external changes and also create the changes that you want to see. But in order to create, you must have a vision of what you want, and your vision will be informed by your desires, which are dictated by your values.

That’s a long-winded way of saying, if you want to do more than just survive–if you want to prosper–you must first get down to basics and really figure out what you are about.

Without moral traction, you’re just spinning your wheels. The scenery might even change, but when the screen falls away, you’ll realize you never actually moved.

**

Humanity is a continuum. We inherited this reality from the generation that came before us, and they from the generation before that. Our children will inherit the sum of what we inherited plus the changes we make to it. To proactively manage that change so we can leave a positive legacy, we should:

1) Accept and engage the reality that we have inherited (serenity)
2) Use our vision and creativity to “leave it better than we found it” (courage)
3) Continually grow and refine our awareness to find the best balance between the two (wisdom)

***

As a mental “cheat sheet”, just remember: VISION, ACTION, and FAITH are the fundamental pillars of successfully creative behavior. This is my own personal paradigm which I’ve developed within the last year or so. I’ve been wanting to blog about it for a long time. Consider this a teaser. It might not be tomorrow, it might not be next week, but… sometime soon. I’m a little busy with the ACTION part of it at the moment.